The story of a rustic boyhood, first love and eventual exile from a harsh homeland, by one of the giants of modern Portuguese and European fiction. Miguel Torga's celebrated Tales & More Tales from the Mountain, published by Carcanet in 1995, are set in the remote and barren Tras-os-Montes -- 'over the mountains' -- in north-east Portugal. There the writer was born among illiterate country people. In The Creation of the World, his most important book, he recreates his childhood and evokes the men and women living there - complex in emotion and thought, elusive and thrifty with words, direct in action, forced by circumstance to deal with matters of love and hate, life and death, without the illusions and expectations that protect most people, even the urban poor. This autobiography, exactly observed, touches and haunts the reader in the ways that myth and epic do.

Translated by: Ivana Carlsen, Patricia Odber